Birches Update

I’ve been plugging along on the quilting-embroidery for the birches quilt.  Which I realize at this point should be named Birches/Aspens, because the brown pattern is the paper bark birches and the gold is aspens.  I’ve been trying to find a picture of the scene that really inspired this quilt.  It’s hard because the scene is from my life.  My brother once lived in a grove of aspens on the side of a mountain, and there were birches there also.  The rustle and chime of the leaves, the starkness of the trunks during a snowy winter, the curling white of the bark all remind me of the chilly, sunny peace of that place.

This is the current state of the quilt. The embroidery is free-form, and hard to see intentionally, it’s of air. It’s of leaves falling down from the trees, doing that twirling and falling thing the leaves do, and eventually settling in some random spot on the hills. The wind’s colors are silver and blues, while the leaves will be various colors of gold.

Of course, the other part is to just sandwich the pieces together, and that did just fine for that. Needs more, though. I was full of it when I said it would take just one week. That was a really poor estimation. I have a lot of leaves to put on now, some on the ground, and a few left on the branches, the very last ones of fall. It’s fun though. It’s laborious and time-consuming, but then I guess it wouldn’t be worth it if it weren’t.

That’s the back of it. It’s hard to see the front, it’s a lot of texture, but the back shows what I just did. I think all that texture is lovely.

I’ll be starting the leaves tonight. Not sure how I’m going to do them yet, but birch and aspen leaves are fairly simple. I was thinking of outlines, we’ll see how that goes, but maybe I’ll have to fill them in a bit. We’ll see!

The peaches are flowering!

I mentioned I took a trip out to Fredericksburg a couple weeks ago.  The peach trees out near Johnson City (source of the peaches I got last summer and canned) were blooming, and I took a bunch of pictures. Peach blossoms are very light, delicate, airy things.  The trees themselves are small, maybe about 6 feet high and spread out a lot.  In a farm they’re all pruned so there are these tidy rows of short little trees.  Anyway, they were really pretty, so I thought I’d share some pictures I took.

It was very early spring-like out there.  Dark earth, brilliant green with a few early touches of flower color.  I’m still hoping for the best, but it looks like this year’s crop of wildflowers is going to be on the small side.  We’ve had a terrible drought here the past year.  I know people love the warm, sunny weather, but I can’t imagine it’s great if you’re a grower of things or managing our public water supply or in charge of the lakes and rivers. I like rain and thunderstorms, and I’ve missed clouds.

Of course, I’m going to get another box of peaches this July. And I’m going to skip the jam because I want to make a lot more salsa this year, and can more tomatoes. Want a jar? If you do, tell me and I’ll make you one. And I’m going to try to make some other stuff, more tomatoes, I don’t know what else as long as I don’t have to use a pressure cooker.  I keep thinking maybe sauerkraut and hot sauce, too.

I have actually used most of what I canned. I’ll have to tell you about that later. It was very exciting, in a really dorky I-obviously-didn’t-have-to-do-this-when-I -was-growing-up-and-oh-my-god-my-tomatoes-are-still-good-months-later-that’s-so-amazing kind of way. The sourcing and production of food is often a magical and completely unknown process to city/suburban kids. We assume all stuff grows in cans (just kidding, but you see what I mean).

So. Peach blossoms. I kind of kept wondering if they tasted good too – but forebore to eat any. Sometimes flowers are poisonous. Where I grew up there seemed to be lots of poisonous flowering plants (and bugs and animals), like oleander, and so I never just want to eat stuff. Probably a good thing. I also learned to identify and avoid poison ivy. Also good.

So I’ll be there at that farm stand this summer. We’ll do a before and after, if I remember

Quilting inspiration

I have this dream, where I sit down at the computer and get to write a post without having 40 things to do … yeah, well, lately I’ve been working on this post about quilting inspiration.  I picked five quilting-related places to talk about. As you know, I’ve been into doing arty-quilted things lately, and part of that is seeing projects that broaden my ideas about what fabric and stitchery can be.  I’ve been to big quilt festivals, sure, but the thing about the art quilters I see online is that I see the process, and the quilters sitting with their needles and machines, and their motivations, and their particular way of looking at the world. I may not have their skill, but I think I have enough love for it

IKEA: I guess I thought about doing this quilting inspiration after I saw the Project Patchwork textile challenge put on by IKEA Twin Cities and the Minnesota Textile Center (they handed out packets of fabric to see what people could do with ‘em).  So there was this raven quilt (right) that I saw on Whip-Up where they featured the raven quilt’s maker, Becka Rahn (etsy shop) and had an interview with her. This is not traditional, and the motivation was to make something out of unknown supplies, just what you’re given, and challenge your creativity that way.  This quilt was made with one piece of fabric. It made me think how amazed I am with what people can come up with and do with fabric and thread.  I like to see modern or free-form or non-traditional quilting like, whether simple or complicated, because I think fabric and thread is an incredibly versatile medium and I like how people express themselves with it.

Maps & Details: One artist that just amazes me, and who I am frankly jealous of is Leah Evans. Her textile work is maps.  Hand stitched maps. Out of fabric and thread. To my mind, they are nothing short of amazing. If I could choose any idea in the world for a quilt project, I would have chosen to have this idea. I would dearly love to own one, but I am too poor. ::sigh::

I admit that I  adore and cherish maps of all sorts more than most people, and love them as much as I love quilting.  I was known for littering school papers with historical maps I found in obscure places and delighting in really great place names like Tauberbischofsheim (a professor joked I was trying to show off with that one, but it’s a real place I wrote about).  I confess to getting an iPhone because it has built-in GPS maps.

My favorite of Leah’s quilts is one with irrigation circles, but you’ve gotta admit the one with rivers there to the left is pretty darn amazing.  You should look at more of her quilts.  The work is extraordinary and the detail she adds to all of them is completely mind-boggling.  [via DesignBoom]

Color-Texture: For the past several months I’ve been watching the work of Victoria Gertenbach who blogs at the Silly BooDilly. There are several things about her quilts: texture and color being the two that bring me back to see what she’s been working on lately.  There are times when she achieves a certain mixture of texture and color that is really complex, but when you stand back it creates something that’s remarkably simple-seeming.  It’s neat, and it’s gotta be amazing to run your fingers over.  Somewhere along the way I also started cheering for her dog Molasses, who’s been having a lot of health problems lately.

So probably that ‘texture and color and simplicity and complexity’ thing didn’t make much sense, so here’s a detail of one of her functional art quilts from Flickr.  She says this one was “inspired by embroidered patchwork from India” which I definitely see. She also posted the full version of the quilt, but I think the up close detail is really extraordinary. The many multi-colored quilting lines actually simplifies and unifies her patterned fabrics into a more cohesive design concept. On their own, the fabrics and even the combination is not as interesting, and doesn’t convey the same idea.

She’s been featured lately on Etsy for her modern mid-century designs. She really knows how to explore fabric as a medium: I’ve seen embroidery, modern machine quilting and machine embroidery on her site and Flickr pages.

I have also been keeping track lately of two more textile artists who are inspiring in their dedication: hours and hours and hours and hours of hand stitches on large and complex pieces.  I aspire to that kind of dedication, but my stitchery is nowhere near as large and complex as their works. They give me IDEAS about sitting and stitching all day on really big textile pieces.

Complexity. I don’t have pictures from their sites but: one artist is Judy Martin of Judy’s Journal who is stitching a white blanket with white stem stitches, something that probably has a lot of incredible texture in person. My stitchery is certainly not as large or complex as hers, but I always aspire to that sort of thing. I find it interesting to see what she’s working on, as she has long been an artist, and her fingers have stitched and drawn what seems like a thousand things.  Of note is her other blog, One Hundred Quilts dating back to 1982. I am not done going through the list, but holy pete! It takes me a while to take in her pieces.  Imagine! The body of work she has is amazing.  That quantity of quality is also something to aspire to.

Otherworldly. The other artist is Jude Hill of Spirit Cloth, who is crafting something, a pieced and stitched cloth, that seems to change and shift every day in ways that make me think that her cloth is somehow less substantive and more ethereal than mine. I’m not sure it is the same thing every day that’s worked on, but I’m not sure it’s not the same.  It’s a bit fey.  The blog is composed of many close-ups of stitched cloth tied in with recollections and thoughts and musings … a story cloth.  It’s really fascinating on this one to watch the process unfold, which is not something that everyone does with their work.  I like to think I learn something from this about putting one’s thoughts and inspirations into a piece of work, and being less planned and more spontaneous with something.

Honestly? I never really thought I would like quilting and stitching and embroidery so much as I do. But I could sit for hours and hours and do nothing but stitch. And apparently spend hours and hours watching others stitch. I like it as much as I like reading, which if you know me, you know that’s a major statement.  At the moment, my stitchery involves finishing part of my Birches embroidery, which I have ready but can’t reveal until there is sufficient daylight for me to take a picture of it (one of the tribulations of the blog title, you see).

TTFN, Miriam